Walter Terence Stace, the Anglo American empiricist philosopher, was born in London. He was graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1908 and from 1910 to 1932 served in the civil service in Ceylon. During this period he published A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (London, 1920) and The Philosophy of Hegel (London, 1924). In 1932 he retired from the civil service to teach philosophy at Princeton University, where he remained until his academic retirement in 1955. He was president of the American Philosophical Association in 1949.

Stace's The Theory of Knowledge and Existence (Oxford, 1932) is the definitive statement of his general position on philosophical method. His argument rests on the claim that on strict empirical grounds the solipsist position is logically unassailable. Whereas philosophers such as George Santayana, starting with the same claim, appealed to a doctrine of "animal faith" and emphasized the irrational element in belief in an external...